The president spoke to The Washington Post two days after government and rebel negotiators announced a deal that would give guerrilla commanders a new life in politics once they disarm. The two sides will negotiate how to stamp out the cocaine trade in guerrilla territory, a critical point for the United States, which has spent billions of dollars to help Colombia eradicate drugs in those regions.
Santos said he believes that a peace deal and cessation of hostilities could take months, with negotiations in Havana likely dragging on beyond the presidential election in May. But the latest development buoyed a process that has been battered in the news media and by influential opponents led by Santos’s predecessor, Álvaro Uribe, who is now running for Senate.
“There are people who simply don’t think that what we’re doing is the correct thing to do, people who benefit from war, people who would prefer to continue what we have been suffering for the last 50 years,” Santos said. “We’re trying to give our enemies, in this case the FARC, a bridge to a dignified way out — lay down their arms and enter the political arena.”
Qualified support for talks
The talks with the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, have come at a cost to Santos, who took office in 2010 after nearly three years as defense minister in Uribe’s government. Though 80 percent of Colombians had a favorable image of Santos in October 2012, that had fallen to 34 percent in September before rising to 55 percent after the news from Havana, according to the National Consulting Center, a Colombian pollster.
In a statement this week, Uribe lashed out after the latest revelations from Cuba, saying that it is “objectionable that democratic institutions be negotiated with FARC, the world’s biggest drug, kidnapping and murder cartel.”
Óscar Iván Zuluaga, who is the presidential hopeful for the Uribe Democratic Center party, told Reuters on Friday that rebel negotiators “should be in jail paying for their atrocious crimes.”
“They can’t be rewarded with political positions or seats in Congress,” Zuluaga said. “With terrorism, the only thing we can discuss is submission.”
The public here overwhelmingly supports peace talks, but a majority of Colombians believe the negotiations in Havana will not end the conflict, polls show. That view seemed to harden in recent months with news of FARC attacks on security forces and with the publication of images of rebel commanders in Havana, which in recent days included a photo of three guerrilla negotiators lolling on a yacht.
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